Millions of British Muslims could lose citizenship

The UK’s “extreme and secretive” citizenship-stripping powers are putting millions of British Muslims at risk of being deprived of their nationality, a new report has warned.

Research published by the Runnymede Trust and Reprieve on Thursday found that nine million people in the UK – approximately 13% of the population – could be legally stripped of their citizenship at the home secretary’s discretion.

The powers, campaigners warn, disproportionately impact and endanger citizens with heritage linked to South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Both organisations warn that the “deprivation regime” now represents a systematic threat to Muslim communities, echoing the state’s discrimination against British nationals with familial links to the Caribbean in the Windrush scandal.

Under current law, British citizens can lose their nationality if the government believes they are eligible for another citizenship, even if they have never lived in that country or do not identify with it.

The report shows that people connected to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Nigeria, North Africa and the Middle East – all countries with a sizeable UK Muslim population – are among the groups most vulnerable.

Campaigners say this has created a racialised hierarchy of citizenship, where Muslims’ belonging in Britain is conditional in a way that white Britons’ is not.

“The previous government stripped British trafficking victims of citizenship for political gain, and the current government has just expanded these extreme and secretive powers,” Reprieve’s Maya Foa told Middle East Eye.

‘Just like the legislation which caused the Windrush scandal, there are no effective checks to prevent these powers from being used widely’

“The nine million people whose rights could be taken away by the next home secretary have every reason to be worried about what a full authoritarian government might do,” Foa said.

Foa’s concerns were echoed by Shabna Begum, who runs the Runnymede Trust. Begum said there was a “chilling undercurrent of citizenship stripping” at the Home Office’s discretion and that it has disproportionately impacted Britain’s Muslim community.

“Just like the legislation which caused the Windrush scandal, there are no effective checks to prevent these powers from being used widely,” Begum told MEE.

“Citizenship is a right, not a privilege. Yet successive governments are advancing a two-tiered approach to citizenship, setting a dangerous precedent that someone’s citizenship can be removed on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour, no matter how many generations your family has lived in this country.”

The Home Office did not comment at the time of writing. Both organisations said the racial disparities mirror the institutional failings that produced the Windrush scandal.

The report added that people of colour are 12 times more at risk than their white counterparts.

The report traces how citizenship revocation, once a tool used only in exceptional wartime cases, has been transformed by two decades of counterterror legislation.